


Just a Small Sign of Life

by verulam (krynon)



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Mental Health Issues, this is a bit. esoteric? its not in chronological order
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-10
Updated: 2017-03-10
Packaged: 2018-10-02 05:22:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10210484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krynon/pseuds/verulam
Summary: Max leads them to The Blue.****“Mm,” Max mumbles. He makes a soft noise in his throat. “I have- I see things.”There is no silence as they sit next to each-other. The wives- Women, now, since “Wife” was Their word and not hers- some of them have their legs crossed. Hers are pulled to the side, and Max’s sit out to the front, feet planted heavily in sand.“I know,” she says. It mumbles in her throat a little too. No wonder though. They might be out of the wastes, but the sand and dirt tracked their heels (and throats) with little error.But regardless. He sees, she knows. There’s not much else to say. Neither of them have ever been much for wasted words.The water laps at the edge of the dirt, licking and retracting at the dust.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is NOT in chronological order, and was written over a year ago. Please point out any mistakes and I'll fix them asap!

“Mm,” Max mumbles. He makes a soft noise in his throat. “I have- I see things.”

There is no silence as they sit next to each-other. The wives- Women, now, since “Wife” was Their word and not hers- some of them have their legs crossed. Hers are pulled to the side, and Max’s sit out to the front, feet planted heavily in sand.

“I know,” she says. It mumbles in her throat a little too. No wonder though. They might be out of the wastes, but the sand and dirt tracked their heels (and throats) with little error.

But regardless. He sees, she knows. There’s not much else to say. Neither of them have ever been much for wasted words.

The water laps at the edge of the dirt, licking and retracting at the dust.

“Are you alright?” asks The Dag. Furiosa eyes her.

“Me or him?” Her voice is less croaky that time. Maybe the sanded edges of it was just Max’s influence, rubbing off on her again. The Dag looks back with wide but harsh eyes.

“Both.”

Max makes a noise of non-committance, glancing back from the wives to the open water.

Furiosa says, “Mm,” and then they sit in silence.

***

Max had no reason to return to The Citadel, so she does not expect it of him. Max tended not to do very well with expectations.

She doesn’t ask him to return. He does. She doesn’t ask him to help, doesn’t ask him to leave when the work is done.

He does.

She does not expect him to turn up years after his last disappearance, with a messenger and a piece of cloth.

He does.

***

His hands hold the wheel with a kind of clarity he only ever seems to have on the move. Furiosa watches the sandy landscape flash by, but doesn’t bother to steal glances at him. When he shifts or grunts, she looks at him unabashedly; She’s aware not only that he knows she’s looking but that he doesn’t move to stop her.

It’s when one of the women wake up that he starts to shift uncomfortably, though Toast hardly seems out to get something out of him. He keeps his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel. It’s Toast she’s more concerned about, malcontent twisted on her face and leg bouncing up and down between her wringing hands.

Furiosa nearly asks what’s wrong before Toast breaks the silence.

“There are others like you?” She asks. It’s not a question, but Max glances back at her anyway, with a mumbled questioning noise on his lips.

Toast sighs, quietly, and glances at Furiosa. She’s not entirely sure what Toast wants from her, so she simply stays quiet, and meets Max’s glance when he shifts his gaze between the two of them and the road.

“Miss Giddy. I asked, when one of us k- I asked, before. She mentioned that sometimes people’s minds stopped working like they should, that minds need healing like bodies do. Sometimes they never work right at all, and they’re never sane.”

Max looks at her out of the corner of his eyes, barely moving his head.

Toast raises her chin, doesn’t bother to shield her eyes against the steady brightening of morning sun. The whole earth looks yellow-gold this morning, and Furiosa imagines that had she still been wearing white, she’d probably look gold and bright as fire.

Furiosa winces at the thought and lets her speak. 

“Were you always mad?” She says, and Furiosa winces again.

It wasn’t that Max wasn’t mad. Just that ‘mad’ seemed a cruel word to come from a woman so over-exposed to cruelty.

‘Mad’ seemed a cruel word to give to Max, too.

Max shrugs. “‘S’it important?”

After a pause, Toast sits back against the seat. “No,” she says. “No, guess not.”

The world, as she’s learnt a thousand times over, was very rarely kind.

***  
The water around them is as vast and blue as the sky.

She’s never seen anything like it in her life.

“Do you think it’s always been here?”

“Mmh?” Furiosa turns her head. Toast is staring out at the water, just like everyone else, tracking its movements. It rears and smoothes like dunes.

“Has it always been here?” Toast repeats. “If it survived from before, there… could be more. That survived.”

There is no silence here, but the women turn to look at her. Eventually, after she’s tired of rolling potential words on her tongue, Max looks at her too.

“Mmh,” she says. “Maybe.”

“If it did- If it did. We could- If we go around the edges of it, maybe-”

“Maybe,” finishes Cheedo, “Maybe there could be more. It could be like the Green Place.”

“Maybe,” says Furiosa. “Maybe.”

***

Furiosa grasps his head in her hands; He’s cowered, curled small against the wall with his eyes wild and a snarl on his lips. She holds on, and lets her eyes rest shut.

When he relaxes, his hands uncurling and his eyes no longer flick-twitching every way around the room, she stays there a moment.

He is weather-beaten and rough, and when she hears the soft sound of his breath, she almost has to resist the urge to pet his hair.

She doesn’t think he’d take it very well.

By the time he makes a noise of discomfort- and she doesn’t know quite when she got to adept at gauging Max’s noises- she withdraws slowly, carefully.

“Okay?” She asks. She doesn’t bother to keep her voice soft. She wouldn’t appreciate it, if it were her.

“Mmh,” He says. 

Neither of them say anything, and far beyond that room, a gear grinds in the citadel. It rings in their ears.

“Yeah,” Max finally croaks. “Yeah.”

***

The crowd behind them thins as the bike is taken to a garage. Very soon, it’s just her, Max, the unidentified tag-along and a few war boys left buzzing and talking amongst themselves.

“It’s a map?” She asks, taking the scrap of cloth from his hands. It’s almost an offering. He doesn’t catch her eyes, instead scanning the crowd.

“Yes,” He says. “A place.”

The cloth is half blue, half beige, and Max has crammed a map of the wastes into the paler side. It’s all in red, probably blood, and what she assumes is the Citadel is shown as a little circle, painted with a red outline. 

Max points at the ‘X’ he’s stitched where beige gives way to blue, and looks at her seriously.

“Messenger,” he says, and the person behind him steps forward. They look sandy, painted in dirt and with dark hair cut short for practicality. They’re timid, too, uncertain steps and a body that leans around Max rather than taking the steps necessary to stand next to him.

When they say nothing, Max turns in irritation only to have them throw their hands up in defence.

“Who’re you?” She demands.

“I’m The Messenger.” It’s a voice not like hers. Her accent marked her from Not-Here, and so did theirs, but she can’t place it. Far South? Blackmaw’s, maybe?

“Where are you from?”

They glance at Max, who seems to be resisting the urge to bare his teeth. Presumably he hadn’t considered that in order to actually get wherever it was he wanted to go, there was more involved than just jumping in a Rig and driving.

“The North,” They say. “I’m from… It doesn’t matter. Name’s Messenger, and he-” They point shakily at Max to illustrate their point, which does little but make him tilt his head and brace his shoulders in acknowledgement, “He told me to come here. With him.”

“Why?” She asks, studying the map. It looks like it ends, as if he’s ran out of things to depict. After the blue, there was nothing.

“He wants me to bring you to the blue. And, uh, a few others. You-” They glance at Max and then to her, hands now clasped together. “I dunno if you know ‘im, but he’s kamikrazy, right? Not a bit of brains left in him. Just muscles and-”

Max silently riles next to her, and they quiet at the pierce of her glare.

“The Blue?” She echoes.

“Yeah. The Blue. To the North-West.”

She hands the map back to Max, keeping her eyes trained on him. “There’s nothing to the North-West. After Grandrise there’s nothing but salt. The North is only salt.”

“That’s to the West, and that’s to the North.” retorts The Messenger. “I’m telling you to go North-West.”

“Hm,” She replies, quietly, unconvinced. “And how far away is the blue?”

“If we leave late and drive through the night, should be at least four days. Less’n a week.”

“Not ‘we’. You’re not coming,” rumbles Max, and ignores the Messenger as he carries on, “I know the way. He,” Max nods his head towards The Messenger, “Is a Changespeak. He can help the, ah,” 

A pause where Max loses his word.

It takes enough time that The Messenger looks uncomfortable before Max says, “The History Man. The wordburger.”

“...Okay.”

Max isn’t wrong. Miss Giddy was the only wordburger she knew, and she used to have plenty of words, the History Men had plenty too. Just not ones they could understand. A Changespeak would be useful, if that was what he was.

She motions for one of the war pups to get him a room. It’s a familiar order, by now, one she gives for nearly every refugee coming their way. The Messenger shuffles with them without much protest, though he turns quickly to glare at them still standing at the gates.

“Why?” She asks Max, who keeps staring out to the waste. When his gaze swings back around to her, it’s a little softer, and a little more lonely. “Why should they go?”

“They need to see.” He says. “Are they, uh.” Another pause, where he once again seems to struggle with speech. It seems to have gotten worse since he left. “Okay?”

“They’re fine.” Furiosa pauses too, because sometimes it’s difficult to think of children and the safety of this place given her life here. “The baby’s fine, too,” She adds. “Not a baby anymore.”

Max looks torn, and sunset catches on his eyes. “Old enough to…?

Furiosa shakes her head. “A little over a year. She’ll be fine with the Mothers, if The Dag wants her to be.” She allows herself a little smile. “She looks nothing like him. She’s healthy. She called her Valkyrie.”

They stand in silence and Furiosa smiles as they stare out. 

“Will they come?” He asks, voice sombre. The sunset barely reaches his face now. 

“We’ll have to ask them.”

There’s relief on his face as she turns, walks towards the Meeting Places. There’s relief on hers when he simply falls into step behind her.

***

They’re still sitting on the sand, hours later. Furiosa had been and gone, tended to the rig- the heat of the sun made the metal hot to touch, and the engine even hotter. It was simply another thing on her ever lengthening to-do list, though she supposes she managed to make time to go with Max.

If any of the wives- she winces. The women.

They, she reminds herself, were not things.

She shakes herself a little, tracing the blood-warm metal of her arm with her fingers. If any of them had noticed that she’d managed to clear more time for this than for anything else in months, then they had not mentioned anything.

Regardless, they’re still sitting there when she gets back. Most of them have headed back to the rig. The Dag and Capable had sought shelter, Toast following closely behind- they’d offered to help with the engine.

It’s only Max and Cheedo sitting in the dirt- and, she notes as she walks towards them, talking.

“Have you seen it before?” Cheedo says it without looking at him, which she supposes is expected. The water laps at their feet, now, so at some point they both moved forward.

“...Yes. Before I brought The Messenger.” His voice still rumbles as if it has rested unused for years. 

“I meant before,” she says. 

Max eyes her, and she stares back.

She pauses, blinks, purses her lips. “What kind of things do you see?”

Max’s mouth remains shut, but they keep staring at each-other. It’s a competition, almost, but both of them blink. Max squints against the sun, and Cheedo hold a hand above her eyes.

“Is it seeing things that makes you mad?” She asks. 

Furiosa walks fast towards her, hand on her shoulder before she can even think.

“Have-” Cheedo stands up, rising as Furiosa looks at her seriously. “Have you always seen things? Have you always been mad?”

He shrugs with one shoulder.

“Maybe,” He says, and she glances over her shoulder as walks away, red hair whipping against her face.

Furiosa sit down next to him.

***

The night after he comes back: “I thought you were better.” 

It’s The Dag that says it, arms braced on her knees and body bent forward. They all sit together- Max, of course, stands.

He glances at her, frowning slightly. “What?” It’s not soft, but it’s certainly quiet, too quiet to get caught in the rumble of his voice.

The Dag nods as if he’s agreed with her, somehow. “That. I thought you could speak again.”

This time, he shrugs bodily, glancing to the ground. “Comes n’ goes.”

“What,” she laughs, “You sometimes forget how to speak?” 

There’s a silence where nobody else laughs, and instead the way everyone looks at Max goes sombre and quiet. The Dag’s snort of laughter dies in the quiet.

“Sometimes,” He echoes, and before long the conversation turns to other things around him.

***

She wants to ask.

Max slumps against the wall, eyes wide and unseeing. He grips his hands at something she can’t see, makes noises she can’t understand.

She sits down next to him, slowly, quietly, purposefully.

She wants to ask.

When Max comes back to himself, they stare out at the wastes together, and she does not touch him, and they do not speak.

The wastes look beautiful from this distance. Orange and yellow and red. Colours of fire filed through the earth.

She wants to ask, and she does not.

***  
“Where’s he going?” Capable asks her.

They’re in one of the rooms set aside for meetings- she’s still trying to figure out how exactly to ration the water so that nobody dies, that nobody suffers. They still have no idea how much guzzoline and power it took to dig for it, so the plan is to make do. For now. She’s clear to everyone that asks that it will not be forever. She will not let it be forever.

“Hm?” Furiosa knows who she means. Mostly when the wives spoke of men these days, they only meant the one. They did not speak of Before, and they certainly did not speak of Joe. She’s not surprised. 

“Max. He only just got back.” 

“And now,” says Furiosa, picking up a wrench and hauling at a bolt with it. “He’s going. It’s what he does.” The engine she’s fixing was a small one, a generator. Used for heat, she thinks, since it’s certainly not used for speed.

“But where?” Capable pushes, coming to a crouch next to her. When Furiosa meets her eyes, it’s clear she honestly believes Furiosa knows.

“I don’t know,” she says, and it’s truthful, but she looks up and rolls words around her mouth anyway. “To a place he can find redemption, maybe.”

Capable leans forward, puts a pale hand over Furiosa’s dirt-smudged metal. “But couldn’t he have had that here?”

Furiosa twists her mouth up in something that could be a smile, before turning back to the machine. There were a few other bolts in need of tightening, too. “Then maybe,” she says, “That’s not what he’s looking for.”

That’s a lie, though. Redemption is exactly what he’s looking for, though she’s almost certain he’s forgotten what he did wrong in the first place. Redemption was what all of them were looking for, albeit in different places.

Redemption, she knows, looks different to everyone that searched for it. 

In her less practical moments, she wonders if it were designed that way, meant so that everyone had to fight harder to find it themself.

The rest of the time, it is merely a fact. Redemption was hard to find. Furiosa was walking her path. Max had yet to find the start of his. And that too, was simply a fact.

***

“Why are we here?” Furiosa asks. It’s just her and Max, sat with their backs to the rig and their shoulders just- just- touching one another.

Max struggles with the words, she thinks, because he opens his mouth to speak but instead makes an abrupt “Ah,” in the back of his throat before falling quiet again. 

“Because-” he mumbles, after a pause, “They needed, ah,” He swings his head to look at her, mouth pursed. “They needed to see.” 

There’d be a silence, were it not for the water. “...Thank you,” she says. She means it.

“Mmh,” Says Max, shrugging a shoulder. “You’re welcome.”

***

Bright spots flash before her eyes, there’s a thudding and sharp impact to the back of her head and she lands roughly, heaving a breath and gasping.

“Nghn,” She grunts, grits her teeth, and rolls over to her side, pushing herself up-

There wasn’t meant to be anyone here, least of all someone that wanted to fight- The Citadel was meant to be safe, and she shouldn’t have let her guard down.

Her mind finally wakes up from sleep and she tries to grasp the situation. Someone in her quarters- Large, heavily built, no weapons, covered face, all black. Presumably they’d snuck in alone, there are no sirens or alerts.

There is only Furiosa, wearing thin sleeping clothes and stood strong, one foot back and braced, stump up in front of her to block and other pulled around in a fist, and this person. His stance says male, and so do his hulking shoulders- he’s probably top heavy, probably relies too much on punches and brute strength.

She must have fallen out of bed, presumably after he’d hit a blow to the back of her head- there’s no blood, though, or at least there doesn’t seem to be any in what she can make out of the sheets in the darkness.

“Who are you?” She snarls, dropping her stance slightly lower. If he was feral, he might just charge her, and with his height and bulk she’d need to drop and roll if she wanted to get out of the way.

The man doesn’t respond, but he doesn’t take off the hood that shrouds his face either, so Furiosa doesn’t drop her stance.

“I asked you a question. Who are you? Why are you here?”

The man, still shrouded by his hood, doesn’t move, or shift, or acknowledge her existance.

She… has a hunch. “Max?”

The man flinches. Max.

***  
The day hangs heavy over her. There’s politics, and democracy. They meet in the war room, and representatives from the masses gather around the table and speak. For reasons she won’t dwell on, they look to her at the head of the table. There’s legend, too. She’s held at the top, the new god-king, with the wives at her sides in the myth. 

Furiosa sighs into her hands. “This isn’t my job.”

Cheedo looks at her. “Yes, it is.”

“It’s a job,” Furiosa says, mostly to herself. “It’s not mine. I’m not a god.”

Silence. “Joe wasn’t either.”

“No,” agrees Furiosa, easily. “He wasn’t.”

There’s a long, long pause, long enough for her to almost forget the conversation. Cheedo thumbs through books on the shelf, and Furiosa bores her gaze into papers as if the paper itself wasn’t scarce.

“Nobody is.” 

Furiosa looks up. Cheedo is staring at her, intensity built into her gaze.

“Nobody’s a god, Furiosa.”

 

***

“Last time we set out for an ideal, everything was dead.” Cheedo doesn’t sound angry, just bitter. It’s not meant as an attack, though she flicks her hair out of her face with a severity Furiosa recognises as adrenaline.

“We set out for an ideal and then re-found the Citadel,” corrects Toast. “We got rid of Joe in the process.”

“That’s not the point,” Cheedo says. “We never found the Green Place.”

“No,” agrees Toast. “We didn’t. But we didn’t have a map, then, did we?”

Cheedo does agree with that, though Furiosa can only tell from the particular way her mouth shifts. “That doesn’t mean we should be needlessly optimistic. This messenger could lie.”

“Max has been there,” cuts in Furiosa. They whip around to stare at her. “You want to see the map?”

They do, and they study it. If they realise it’s stitched in blood, they don’t mention anything. Though, Furiosa supposes, they would hardly be shocked. They were women after all, and their lives had been little but blood since they’d been brought here.

“The North?” Toast’s face is twisted in disbelief. “There’s nothing but salt.”

“The Messenger helpfully pointed out that it’ll be North-West, not North, or West.” Furiosa sighs, shifting and popping her joints. It soothes an ache she hadn’t known was there. “Max seems to think it’s there.”

Cheedo and Toast look at each-other. “He was mad before. What makes you think he’s sane now?” 

Furiosa shrugs. “He’s reliable.” She says, which, of course, doesn’t really answer the question.

***

The drive is longer than any of their usual supply runs, but they don’t bring the entourage that was typical of the rig they drive. It’s just the rig and a small tank of fuel, enough to bring them to this Far-North-West place and back.

They all come, the women. She hadn’t expected that The Dag would, at least, with her girl, but she does, and doesn’t seem too unhappy about it.

“The mothers will care for her,” She says, “They always do.”

Cheedo comes with little affair, and so does Capable. Toast sets her affairs in orders- she’s on the Court, one of the few designated to speak in the War Room. There is a Milk Mother that replaces her on a moment’s notice.

Furiosa is not replaced, but then her loss is unprecedented. Furiosa has no Imperators, no war-mongers, so she goes to the Bullett Farm and Gas Town and to see the Buzzards (rarely) in person, and makes her demands in person.

She will have no cult telling tall stories.

***

Max grunts as they go over yet another dune.

“Soon,” he says, looking at Furiosa as if that word was the most important thing he’d ever said. 

***

“What did you do?” She asks.

Its the middle of the night. The darkest part, the simplest part, where the Dawn had not yet started to force it’s way through. She feels most at ease in this part of the night.

Max is meant to be sleeping. He is not; his breathing never deepens out.

She doesn’t ask again. She knows he’s listening, as she nudges the rig up a gear. She does it seamlessly, feels the vibrations of it in her bones.

The women do not stir.

“I,” he says. 

She’s hardly pressed for time, though. She lets him search for the words by himself.

“I wandered, I think. Looked. I don’t remember.” When she glances at him, he’s staring out if the window, hands and fingers braced at his temple. 

“Mmh,” She says.

The sky outside is pinpricked with white and painted in places with a portraiture of constellations.

The whole earth seems blue, and quiet, and calm. It’s a nice change.

Max leans back gently in his seat, relaxed but for the absent minded bounce of his leg.

A longer silence. Hours maybe, companionable and still but for the roaring of the engine.

She breaks it eventually, but it’s hardly shattered. Her voice is soft, and the sound of it doesn’t trigger whatever alarm system was built into Max’s head. “What did you use for the map?”

His gaze flicks to her. “Whose blood, y’mean.” 

She inclines her head. He settles again in his chair.

“Mine. Theirs.” Max’s head shakes, abruptly. “Not sure. Either.”

“Mm,” she says. “Okay.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading! You can find me on tumblr at verulams.tumblr.com!


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